The Breeding Season

by Amanda Niehaus

  It’s nearly dusk. Groote Eylandt shudders off the sun.

  Elise makes for the tin shed that is both arrivals and departures, ticketing and baggage claim. There, she stands among the tall, bleached eucalypts and scans the faces for someone who might claim her, a student or research assistant come to ferry her to the field station. But meeting no eyes, she moves back into the shed and sits on a metal bench to wait.

  She prefers departures to arrivals—anticipation to disappointment—and there is little here to inspire her, people simply heaving their bags off the trolley when it finally swings around, striding off to dusty work trucks in the car park. Getting down to business.

  Soon she’s waiting alone. Bugs flick against the lights. No reception on her phone.

  When did the world become so quiet?

  There are sounds, of course—the slam of equipment and doors by ground staff as they shutter and gate the offices up for the night—but they are background sounds, outside her periphery and experience, and mean nothing to her. They are like the sounds of the maternity ward, the alternative dimension of it, with living babies and happy, exhausted mothers and friends and families bringing champagne and pâté and blue cheese and all the forbidden things, things that Elise hadn’t eaten at all.

  Her own room had been silent: the hush of disquiet, of unbreathing lungs.

  It is like that now.

  Maybe I’ve died, she thinks idly, a throw-off thought but interesting, because this, it seems, would be a likely place for oblivion. The good ones move on from here, walk through the red dirt to some oasis in the island’s heart. The bad, dingo fodder. Crocodiles. She considers the distance to the research station, the falling night, the heavy bags she’s brought. The smell of resin and egg, tree and road, wild and manufactured.

  She doesn’t stand when she hears a truck rumble into the car park, door creak open and close hard again. She doesn’t turn to look when she hears the jangle of keys approaching, because she is tired and annoyed, and what does it matter anyway? But she smiles when the girl steps in front of her, small-boned and thong-footed.

  ‘Elise!’ says Caro, breathless. ‘I’m so sorry I’m late. We had an epic trapping session at the gorge, and a tyre puncture at the back end of Tip Over, and the whole afternoon went to shit. Let me help you with the bags.’ She picks up the two heaviest, swings them easily over her slim sun-brown shoulders, one on each, and goes to grab a third before Elise stops her.

  It takes about twenty minutes to drive the road between the airport and the research station, and they don’t meet any cars on the way. Elise isn’t in the mood to talk, but forces herself to ask the younger woman about her research, what she’s focusing on this year.

  Caro, it turns out, is working on home range sizes, habitat use and motor performance.

  ‘Last year I trapped close to town. This time, I’m after quolls from across the island,’ she says. ‘So I can see how growing up in a complex, rocky habitat or an open grassland affects their performance.’

  ‘What, like sex performance?’

  Caro laughs. ‘No, how they move. How agile they are, or how fast. You’d expect rocky quolls to be smaller and more agile—it should make it easier for them to move around.’

  She is Vair’s favourite student. Smart and lean. Elise thinks of her own body, too soft and permeable, and how she will reshape herself to suit her new future.

  ‘Did you know,’ says Caro, ‘some males run up to ten kilometres in a night during breeding looking for females. And mating. You know what’s important for mating?’ She pauses, glances at Elise.

  ‘Running?’

  ‘No way. The males fight with each other, restrain the females during sex. Even at the end of the season, when they’re looking like shit, starting to die off, these males bite and grasp as good as they ever could. That’s the performance that matters.’

  As well, Elise thinks. As well as they ever could.

  ‘There’s no point in escaping predators at that stage,’ says Caro. ‘It’s all about sex. To the bitter end.’

  ‘What about the females?’

  Caro laughs again. ‘Oh, for them it’s always running.’

  The lab, the kitchen, the team down-time area is a shipping container with a lean-to porch and a smatter of tan plastic chairs tipped against the side. Though the air is tepid, the inside lights seem winter-warm, and Elise’s irritation subsides with the clinking sounds of dinner-making and Fleetwood Mac. Elise and Caro haul the bags down from the back of the truck and crunch across the gravel, through a small gate in a wire fence that surrounds the container and a half-dozen tents, maybe more.

  ‘Dingo fence,’ Caro says, nodding at the enclosure. ‘Not that they come in, anyway, but we had to put it up for health and safety.’ She winks. ‘It’s bandicoots are the real problem.’

  Elise glances around but can’t see anything in the darkness outside the little compound. Caro points to a dusty green tent across the open patch of dirt.

  ‘That’s yours.’ But she motions for Elise to come inside first. ‘Tomorrow’s a long day, better you meet everyone now.’

  And so Elise steps over the red dust and droppings, mouse or gecko, and into the next ten weeks of her life.

  The inside of the container is sparsely decorated, a kind of multifunction studio space where work and life overlap, where the elevated racetrack Caro uses in her project leans over a flimsy lino-topped desk stacked with papers, a laptop, a handful of permanent markers. A dartboard is pegged on top of a forestry map of the island. Across every wall, laminated photos of mammals seem to peer out with beady eyes, supervising this diorama of human domesticity, with its little sink and fridge and dusty shelf of plates and bowls and cups, saucepans and cast-iron skillet. Its dusty men and women.

  Caro introduces Elise around the room. She’s met some of them before—Vair’s research assistant Juliette (Jay, she is reminded) and a tall, freckle-faced honours student named Paulie. But at the sink, someone new. A bandicoot guy named Tom, from a research group in Melbourne, who turns to wave hello and who is so much like John he nearly stops Elise’s heart. Heavy dark brows over green eyes, mouth down-turned, thick brown curls cresting over his head down his forehead.

  ‘Hi,’ he says, and somehow his mouth is still down-turned as he smiles. ‘You eat beef?’

  Elise clears her throat, fills her lungs, and smiles back at the room, at its sun-cooked scientists, its odd op-shop decor, its mealy, leathery, salt-jam smells. She hopes to be inclusive. She hopes this isn’t a mistake. ‘Absolutely,’ she says, and drags out a chair from the table.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ asks Tom.

  Elise considers every possible answer she could give, some less than professional. She blushes and rubs her thumbnail in her lap. ‘My plan is to collect blood and tissue samples over the season, characterise the physiological degradation of the males. I want to know why the male quolls die, I guess. And the females live. What it is that’s so different between them.’

  ‘Besides everything.’ Tom laughs. It is a kind, conspiratorial laugh. His eyes glitter. He pinches a rissole off the pan with his fingers, tucks it between two slices of bread, and passes the plate to Elise. Floral melamine, like Aunt Rosie used to have. ‘Let me get you some sauce,’ he says, and she tries not to hear the wrong thing.

  Later, she lies in her tent on an unmade swag, watches the clearstar sky through the mesh top, and listens to the scratch and rustle of bandicoots digging in the dirt outside. She’s glad Caro told her in advance, wouldn’t have wanted to guess at the sound on her own, has always been prone to dreams about shuffling, flesh-gnashing zombies. It’s all too much now, the long day, the leaving, and though she wanted to work the pain out of her body, she never imagined the ghosts that would join her here, all of them taking faces in the darkness. Her mother and John Faulkes and William. The babies she never knew at all.

  Dan.

  The sky is absolutely clear; how is it possible it can be so clear?
>
  Clear like Colorado, the mountains, thin air and pine, and Dan’s arm heavy across her, Dan’s shoulderblades moving up and down with his deep dreaming breaths, the smell of sweat and dust between them, the only thing between them. Tired legs, the light throb of a blister on her heel. New boots, soon broken in. No fly on the tent, no chance of rain, only the tips of trees and stars forever.

  A sound outside, not close, not far.

  A human snuffle grunt, a quiet mewl, the scratch of tent fabric. Tom and Caro probably, though she can’t say why she thinks it. She doesn’t want to hear them but can’t stop listening, and after a minute or two she puts her hand to her own groin, still in pants, and the feel of her fingers—even through all that fabric—jolts her. She rubs gently, fingers flat, until her body loosens. She pushes away the image of John, of Dan, lets a stranger press himself against her, rocks her hip into him, into her hand, all of this good but not enough now and she unbuttons her pants and slides her fingers down inside them, inside her underwear, through the coarse hair to the little knob of clitoris, erect and waiting. She dips her forefinger into her vagina to wet it, and pulls the slick mucus up over the lips of her vulva, her clitoris, around and around in a careless circle, her hand someone else’s hand, her finger someone else’s tongue, male or female, wetting her licking her sucking and flicking faster and stronger until some inside part of her begins to twist, tighter and tighter with each moist circle, and her own hips lean up with it, and she hears them out there in the tent in her tent in her body, and her pelvis strains in waiting, aching, and then it comes, and she twitches all down her body, out her body, through her legs and torso, and she is, briefly, a warm and supple creature again, made of all those stars.

  chapter 15

  The museum juts against the water and, mostly underground, is the kind of building to defy a war. They spiral down the stairs into the entrance hall, a great sandstone cavern, a deepness like the belly of a ship, and pause to look at the large art at the bottom. It is the colour of sex, he thinks, the pink of hidden things.

  He cannot stand too close to her.

  ‘It’s like a warning,’ she says. ‘The colour of these paintings. It’s like all the brains that liquefy in this place.’ Her upper lip curves to the left when she smiles. ‘But I’m serious, take it easy as we go. This museum will fry you.’

  As they walk past the bar, a puppy-eyed bartender stands from where he’s been stacking bottles and comes out to give Hannah a kiss on the cheek, a brief hello. Dan tries not to watch, examines the cocktail list. It’s too early to drink, of course, and yet the museum is suited more to night than day, an underground maze of rooms, flickering lights. He can feel the music through his feet, like a pulse. Wants to know how she knows the man, how well, how recently.

  Hannah pulls him on down the corridor, through a narrow door, and another. ‘Here,’ she says with a flourish, ‘are the Madonnas.’ She stands back.

  Four faces on a rose-coloured wall—life-sized sheet-shrouds, inhuman, with blackshadow shawls like pooled blood around them. Their red mouths are open. The teeth are terrible and real. Real, human teeth. Out of body. Remnants.

  ‘Well,’ he says. He shudders. ‘Teeth seriously freak me out.’ He is a careful distance from the paintings. ‘I used to think the tooth fairy carried all my teeth in a little box.’

  ‘And what would she do with them, then?’

  ‘Something awful. Eat them. Shake them at me. Make paintings.’ He laughs, but does not tell her how he used to imagine the tooth fairy herself: a pleasant-seeming girl with a fish-like mouth that opened wide, too wide, exposing teeth down her gullet. Teeth where they were not supposed to be.

  ‘So did she come to your house?’

  ‘The tooth fairy? Not for long. My mom told me the truth about four teeth in, when I lost one and cried for two days.’

  Hannah laughs. ‘So this is like therapy, then. Good for you, face your fears.’

  But the Madonnas also remind him of his mother, her true face unseen behind the cloth cover, white teeth gleaming in the shape of a smile. And Elise, who will not tell him what she really feels, will not give him even a fragment of herself to hold or to recognise, even when she needs him.

  He knows she needs him.

  He saw it in her face after Rainbow Beach, and the night she let him hold her on the bed but wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t say what had happened.

  I can’t feel him moving.

  Dan is too close to the teeth, too far from everything important.

  ‘What’s the plan for tonight?’ he asks.

  Hannah shrugs. ‘Berlin does things on his own time. He’ll message later, and then we’ll see. But don’t worry. He’s excited to meet you.’

  Dan feels her heat her nerves the shift in air around her body. He grips his phone too tightly, imagines that she might set his phone to the side, and her bag, and unbutton his pants and press herself against him on the blank wall beside the exhibit, laughing Madonnas’ teeth chattering, her tongue all around his cock in her mouth, her teeth gently sliding along it, lips like a vulva. Her taste, her tongue.

  ‘I can’t believe it’s your first time,’ she says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Meeting him.’ She raises her eyebrows and smiles. ‘Hey, I want to show you something.’

  She grabs his hand and pulls him along behind her, and he wonders: is this cheating? His hand in her hand, this woman, his thoughts, a vulva, a suite, a museum devoted to sex and death?

  But she does not indulge him, or his fantasies. She takes him instead to the body of a horse. It hangs limply from its midsection. Seems impossible that such a thick, strong body could dangle with such fluidity, such graceful sadness, spine curved into a horseshoe, nose to hoof hoof hoof hoof.

  He knows this horse.

  He knows the look of loss.

  ‘This is my favourite,’ she says, voice low and soft as if to leave the creature sleeping. She does not release Dan’s hand.

  ‘They don’t always hang it, or any of the permanent collection,’ she says. ‘You come and you don’t know what you’re going to get, only that it will startle you. Horrify you.’ She laughs. ‘But this one, I always look for it. The artist is Berlinde de Bruyckere. She’s fucking phenomenal. It’s my body in sadness. When I look at it and I’m sad, it reminds me how normal it is to feel that way, and when I’m happy it reminds me where I was, where I’ll end up again.’

  ‘Are you sad a lot?’ he asks.

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  He looks at the horse. He could tell her all of it. An image in his mind of a man in the snow, a man freezing to death, a man who would kill and eviscerate his own horse, climb inside it to survive the storm. Could he do what he needed to? Knee his way in through the steaming organs? Curl up in the warm, red interior of the thing?

  Dan sees himself closed in. Sewnshut buttonedshut zippedshut inside the horse, already becoming part of it, unseen, forgotten, bones in bones in leather in the end.

  ‘Of course you are,’ she says, after a moment. ‘You’re an artist, and all great art comes from tapping into that.’ She looks at the horse. He looks at her. ‘The beauty of melancholy, desolation, mourning.’

  How does she know?

  He wants to kiss her, melt into her. He feels he could, and why not? Is there any reason not to?

  Besides Elise?

  Night has darkened the river outside, but the suite is warm with light. Dan sits on the lounge and watches the Whiteley, has been focused on it for some time when she slides the dining chair back and comes to join him. She shuffles his papers to the side to sit, and crosses her legs under her. On the coffee table beside them, the cursor on his laptop screen blinks provocatively on a white page. He has finished a draft of the thing, but it’s not done yet.

  He looks at her, the laptop, the painting. ‘I need to figure out what’s missing,’ he says.

  He’s had a few glasses of wine and his mouth is dry. Whiteley’s painting is deceptively simple—
white wall and headstones, feathered poplars. A basic landscape, almost bleak. But the beauty is in the motion of it, how the ground, the path, everything seems to flow into the cemetery. Life moves towards death.

  ‘It goes both ways,’ says Hannah Wallace, reading his thoughts. ‘Look how the earth streams in, but also away.’ She pulls her hand through the air like a tide. ‘It’s not just about the very end, but also every other little end that lets us start something new. The moments when we come back out of that place.’

  ‘I see it,’ he says, but he is looking at her. She has nestled into the pillows, is warm, is like fire, and he can’t look away.

  She holds his gaze.

  ‘It’s time,’ she says.

  ‘For what?’ His body tightens.

  ‘I’m going to take you to him. To see Berlin.’

  She stands and extends her hand to him, and the long loose arm of her sweater flops over both their hands when he takes it, concealing them.

  Though they are alone, she leans close to his ear. ‘Are you ready?’ Her mouth smells of hops.

  *

  It’s late, after ten, and Dan’s breath fogs the air as they walk between the pavilions. Neither has worn a coat. They come to a large building, set apart from the others, and when Hannah pulls open the door he smells chlorine and cedar.

  ‘Where are we?’ he asks, but he already knows.

  They pass through another door into a space that both calms and terrifies him. He can’t say why. The room is made of long planks of wood, cedar and mahogany, hinges at the ceiling to tilt open, exposing the coolness of water, ripples of satin that do not end but seem to drift out into the darkness beyond. The whole building is slant-fronted with windows that, black with night, promise a view in the day.

  And in the water, a man swims. Freestyle, arm over arm, so smoothly that he hardly seems to break the surface as he moves. The way a man ought to swim, Dan thinks. The way he might, in another life.

  ‘I’ll see you after,’ whispers Hannah, and disappears.